There's the fax, the voice mail, e-mail, the corporate intranet. Then there's the phone, the cell phone, the car phone, the beeper and the pager.

Whew. Juggling all these labor-saving devices can really be a chore.

A new workplace study conducted by the Gallup Organization and the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Institute for the Future, released yesterday, found that workers are bombarded by an avalanche of information from an ever-expanding array of computerized devices. A growing chorus of workers here and around the nation are starting to cry for a respite from the intrusions, the researchers said.

The study found that the 1,035 employees who were surveyed and observed at work received an average of 190 messages each day, most of them requiring at least some form of response. Many workers said they start their workday earlier and stretch it later at night to keep up. Forty percent of the workers said they are interrupted by incoming messages six or more times an hour.

"We're drowning," said Meredith Fischer, a vice president of office products company Pitney Bowes Inc., which funded the study to learn how to make the tools more productive. "We're working in an interruption-driven workplace. . . . You can't finish the project, finish the thought."

Economist Paula Rayman, director of the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute, said workers she has interviewed are expressing the same frustration, particularly because they are being required to work longer days to handle round-the-clock streams of requests for information, communication and collaboration. "People are treated like they are machines that are on all the time," she said.

To be sure, many experts believe the growth of information technology is making people work smarter and faster -- though several academic studies have reached differing conclusions on the effect on productivity.

Bob Cohen, vice president of the Arlington-based Information Technology Association of America, a trade group whose members include International Business Machines Corp., Electronic Data Systems Corp., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and other makers of high-tech equipment, said the new technologies offer essential competitive tools that "provide tremendous reach" for the companies that use them well. The problem, he said, is that some companies are not training their workers adequately on how to handle the flow of information.

"It takes discipline to be effective," Cohen said.

Aimee Dunn, 35, an investment banker in the District, said the new machines allow companies to eliminate some of the old, stultifyingly boring jobs, and are leveling the old hierarchical structures of business by giving many more people access to data. But she said workers need to be ruthless at deleting unnecessary telephone messages, minimizing small talk and moving extraneous e-mail straight to the trash.

"You can only be deluged if you allow yourself to be," Dunn said.

Many other Washington area workers said they viewed the new technologies as a mixed blessing.

Gale Stieler, a District resident who has been a legal secretary for 19 years, said the new equipment allows some things to be done more quickly but can quickly lead to information overload. At her office, for example, when a fax arrives, workers are notified by computer to come to the machine for immediate pickup.

"So you have to get out of what you are doing and pick up the fax," Stieler said. "You're interrupted all day."

She said answering the phone is harder than it used to be, too. When she answers the phone for the lawyers in the office now, she said, many callers insist on being connected to voice mail. Later, she has to use passwords to gain access to the voice mail so she can tell the lawyers -- who don't want to waste any of their own time -- what the messages said. And because the callers spoke to a machine, they have no sense that a long message might be inconvenient for the listener, she said.

"Some people just go crazy -- they go on and on, and I'm there writing it all down," she said.

Sam Kim, 24, of Arlington, and Mark Finn, 27, of Manassas, both computer specialists at a nonprofit educational group in the District, said automated information systems are good for their social lives, though they can be a distraction at work.

"It's the way people communicate secretly," said Kim, the nonprofit's Webmaster. "For young people, all we do is e-mail our friends and send jokes to each other."

Rick Morment, 54, a trade association manager in the District, said that what irritates him is the explosion of junk faxes his office receives, most of them advertisements. They get so many that one worker's job is simply to monitor incoming faxes, he said.

"Two to three years ago, faxes were the easiest way to get important messages," Morment said. "Now there's so much junk that important messages are lost among the chaff."

Economist Rayman said her research indicates that constant work interruptions can hurt the work product. She said Xerox Corp. found they caused their engineers to make more mistakes, and Fleet Bank learned they led to risky loans because the loan officers were too distracted to think clearly. Both companies found ways to protect these workers from the endless barrage.

At Radcliffe, academics have begun to work at home to escape the multiple interruptions at the office, she said.

"All these workers wanted 'sacred time' -- time during the day with no interruptions," Rayman said. "You absolutely need uninterrupted time to get your work done. If you are constantly bombarded with messages, you never get your real work done."